I'm a little surprised they wouldn't continue to sell the obvious bestsellers but doing so would probably be a rounding error for them and someone like Walmart in particular is certainly a lot better positioned to capitalize on DVD impulse purchases when people are in the store for something else.
TVs, appliances, computers and accessories, smarthome and fitness stuff, phones...
Although it looked like they were toast at one point, they're at least somewhat profitable and have something like $40B in annual revenue--although that's declined somewhat year over year.
I think a TV is about the only thing there I would consider buying from them. Fitness stuff seems far better to get from the manufacturer, or a sporting goods store. Phones seem best from carrier, or Apple. Is that not the case?
Not sure on the rest of the appliances. Is an odd listing.
By fitness stuff, I meant Fitbits and that kind of thing.
Personally, I very rarely go into a Best Buy. Yes, I might buy a TV or a major appliance there but those are very rare purchases. I might browse once a year to see what the latest wearable and Internet of Crap stuff is out there but I literally can't remember the last time I bought something at a Best Buy.
Last time I visited because I needed a replacement mouse immediately, most of the floorspace was dedicated to TVs and sound systems, the next biggest section was smart home / IoT stuff, next biggest was computers which was mostly chromebooks and those terrible $400 windows laptoos, and a couple aisles for video games. There was one rack of blu-rays in a section of the store that felt like you had wandered into an employee-only area.
I also tried to get a new surge protector in the same visit and they only had 2 choices in-store, both of them were over $50 for no obvious benefit over a $15 one from target.
I don't know but my local Walmart seems to give them pretty good placement to catch someone's eye if they're wandering through the store. I'm sure sales overall are still way down but they certainly don't hide the discs in the back.
Maybe not with just a single regular disc, since those require hardware owned by a shrinking group of people who might impulse buy a DVD. But I wonder if it would be worth it if they were "collector sets" or something, maybe with a digital download, and some extra stuff in a box. (Art books, posters, etc) I feel like you'll actually get a few people impulse buying a 100$ set, vs a 12$ DVD.
Are they just going to convert into another cellphone shop? Last time I was there they literally hid all the good games and dvds to reduce shrinkage but it also made it appear like they were out of stock on everything. There wasn’t even a slip or something to know to ask the front desk for inventory.
> Are they just going to convert into another cellphone shop?
I think they're planning to convert their stores into more of a "showroom" type experience that supports their online shopping. They converted at least half the floor-space of our local Best Buy into a warehouse/online order pickup area. IIRC, the guy manning one of the cell-phone displays was actually a Samsung employee.
The displays are all owned by the company’s whose product they sell. Like there is a Microsoft area an Apple area and Samsung etc. They are all owned and maintained by the vendor.
I'm thinking more they're getting ready to liquidize. Brick and Mortar stores are empty AF, and failing left and right. People want to go back to the 1800's when you built a farm, and went to town once a month for supplies, and that's that.
Everything is online, so why not. Walmart has the luxury of being somewhat essential having grocery departments, so they can keep foot traffic that way - but a lot more people get groceries via delivery as well.
My family we're all pretty much -- if I see it, I want it, so I buy it regardless of if we should. Ordering delivery we buy a TON less junk food, and uneeded crap.
We just order what we need, it also helps with our ADHD because we forget ingredients ALL the time when planning meals, so we just call and have the meal tomorrow instead of today, but that ends up being 5 days later, and then something we did buy for that meal goes bad and its a vicious cycle.
>Walmart has the luxury of being somewhat essential having grocery departments, so they can keep foot traffic that way - but a lot more people get groceries via delivery as well.
The Walmart near me is always packed even though it's a lousy place IMO to try to do a full grocery shopping.
I don't know the numbers but my sense is that online grocery shopping didn't take off and stay taken off to nearly the degree that some people thought it would. I certainly don't see that many pickers in my local stores that offer delivery.
Because that was the point of Best Buy - if I was going to buy something online, I'd just get it from Amazon|eBay|Newegg. The point of Best Buy is that it's a physical store that you can go to in order to see the physical object before you buy it, buy it immediately (zero shipping time), and also as a secondary but important angle since it's an actual store you completely skip the "market" where people try to sell you counterfeit flash drives.
Reminds me of how restaurant chains get bought out, and the menu's "optimized" for the best sellers only. Cutting ingredients that are used in the niches. Narrowing in on the stuff that sells the most only. Until all that is left is the same thing you can find in any of their competitors. No differentiation left. Followed by a slow death spiral towards closure as the race to the bottom leaves only one store of type X per area, the one that has the best lease, or can cut the most corners and crush their workers the most to squeeze a slight profit advantage.
At least when they finally came to the Seattle area they picked one of the worst possible locations to open. Much like the ill-fated 'supermall' that opened in the valley south of Seattle (slightly closer to the secondary city of Tacoma) decades before it, they entered an area already well served by surrounding malls/businesses without enough value to the consumer to be worth the drive / trip to a new out of the way location. This was also during the era when it was still reasonable to order things from Amazon, without too much worry of co-mingling / risks; let alone newegg which had pulled back from a brick and mortar expansion to focus entirely online.
In the last few years of Fry's Electronics operating their Renton WA (South Seattle) location they were barely even better than E.G. BestBuy or Walmart for emergency part procurement. In fact both of those stores had methods of pricing online and IIRC also buying / checking inventory directly at the local store.
Offhand I suspect there was also some sort of toxic sales person focused competition among employees, since they always seemed to really want to have documentation on the sale of helping a customer reach their purchase.
Talking about it, Fry's Electronic's reminds me of what happened to Radio Shack. Really a failure to continue delivering value and adjust to the current market (which isn't to say eliminating the niche that makes them what they are within a market).
I understand that streaming is a great option but what about high quality? I buy Blu-rays of media where quality is a high point of the experience. Things like Pixar films, traditional animation, films with extraordinary visuals (e.g. LoTR).
Are there full-quality digital/downloadable options that I'm not aware of?
To me it looks more like a continuation of the decline of brick and mortar retail. Even if I want to watch films on blue-ray, why would I ever want to drive to a Best Buy to purchase them?
If I really must have something right now, I'm highly unlikely to spend 30 minutes plus to drive to the nearest Best Buy to purchase a physical disc. And I don't think that's atypical. I have to believe the most common pattern for someone to buy physical media at a local store is that they're in the store for some other reason and they see a disc for a movie they want to watch.
Browsing an enormous shelf of hundreds (at peak thousands) of films is a much better way to find new things than clicking "Next" 5-20 at a time and trying to parse a tiny thumbnail with a probably half-corrupted title.
Because of overall efficiencies in carbon emissions and packaging waste when things are delivered by a palette load to a local-to-you retailer rather than individually packaged to be sent directly to homes?
Interesting… why wouldn’t you? Do you live far from one?
I love going to Best Buy (and most stores), but maybe that’s just because it was great growing up with them as a source for all things electronic.
Personally I get more joy from browsing stores in person compared to browsing digitally. It becomes something to do—an event of sorts. We exist in the physical world; the digital world is less satisfying to my other senses.
There was quite the kerfuffle around the Internet Archive and their controlled lending efforts wrt books online. The disappearance of media formats that could be physically lent out and the total lack of media owners being willer to offer the same digitally was the risk they were attempting to mitigate.
Culture dies when libraries can't lend it (which they can today due to first sale doctrine applicable to physical media, whether books, DVDs, etc), and it's locked behind digital rights and streaming portals (where first sale doctrine does not apply). When physical media dies, you'll either be a consumer willing to pay "whatever the market will bear" for your temporary license (books, music, video, whatever), or a pirate. Archives can still accumulate culture for safekeeping (physically and digitally), it'll just be inaccessible to the public for a century or two sliding window into the past based on current flavor of copyright statute insanity.
I think a lot of streaming services offer some sort of 4K upgrade pricing. [0] Doesn't seem like the requirements for netflix are even that demanding, minimum 15mbps is at least a common internet speed where I'm from.
Haha yeah that's possible, I don't even own a 4K TV at the moment, so I'm out of the loop here. I guess in the exact terms of how many lit-up pixels you get per second, it's the same. 15mbps sounds like some serious compression though I bet.
The requirements are so low because the bitrate is so low. 4k off an internet stream doesn’t compare to off the disc.
If you want DolbyVision, HDR, highest resolution and bitrate, physical media is still the only option that I’m aware of. Bummed about this happening because when I’ve tried ordering Bluray from Amazon, the discs sometimes show up loose in the cases and scratched up.
4k content from Netflix does not look as good as 4k content from Blu-ray.
Especially for dark scenes, Netflix's stream is full of decompression artifacts making everything grey and blotchy.
They also have a problem with older noisy 1080p sources. Badly upscaled to 4k and then bandwidth-limited it sometimes looks comically bad.
When I tried out the 4k Netflix option in early 2023 I found myself wanting an option to downgrade to their 1080p encoding for a few of the shows I was watching.
I was told Netflix hired really smart people for like 300-500k/year for the express purpose of avoiding stupid shit like this.
UHD disc media has a bitrate from 72mbps to 144mbps. I won't say it's a night and day difference, my parents can't tell the difference. But there's a difference and if you're really particular about quality (okay okay, I'm a bit of a snob) it's a big deal.
For something like a Marvel movie, whatever. For something like Planet Earth or 2001, watching it on streaming is disappointing after owning the disc version.
Agreed. Streaming is wildly inappropriate for things like horror films where compression and macro blocking ruin the dark scenes.
The bitrate of a 4k blu ray sometime peaks above 100MB/s, yet most streaming providers max out around 20MB/s.
There will always be a place for the enthusiast who is willing to put up with a little hassle and higher cost for a better overall experience, and boutique blu ray sales have really taken off lately for this exact reason.
This isn’t the death of physical media, but it might be the death of retail physical media.
FWIW If you find yourself without a choice other than streaming, check Apple first. They offer the highest bitrate typically.
Apple will sell you 4K downloads through iTunes. IME they're pretty good about getting you on to the latest/highest quality version of something if there is ever an upscaled edition released.
Oddly enough my college-aged daughter just asked if we had an extra dvd player laying around, and if not she might get one/ask for one for Christmas. I think she's preparing for when she gets locked out of all of the family's streaming services, or they all go ad-supported.
I kinda wish streaming could basically become like something that maybe has some consistency between platforms and allows for some bundling packages... People can't afford 15 streaming plans, but maybe buy 10 get the last 5 free, and all the plans share based on shared data of usage (medium like model, views / subscribers = % of payout). They could have an added bonus, whoever refers the customer to signup gets an extra x%.
Prime Video now only offers a lot of things on "FreeVee" their ad supported streaming service. It's technically not putting ads in prime video, but it totally is. As 2 recent examples of things I watched, Jury Duty and Detective Pikachu cannot be watched without ads unless you purchase them. If you Google for "Stream detective Pikachu" Google will say it's available on FreeVee and Prime Video, but the Prime Video link redirects you to FreeVee.
I may be an outlier— but I live in Manhattan and have two Best Buys each roughly a ~20 min walk away.
A few times a year I’ll need a cable or an external hard drive, or a new controller, mouse etc, and want it right now and I’ll just walk to whichever Best Buy has it in stock. When I do I still have the same feelings I got as a kid when I’d go to circuit city and the impulse to browse is hard to resist.
They have a lot of fun gadgets, the connected home category keeps growing and growing… doorbells, smart speakers, VR, wearables, theraguns, peloton, e-bikes; not to mention gaming has never been bigger.
My anecdotal point is: there’s lots of techy things to sell besides commoditized content like CDs and Blu-ray’s. Personally I’m never going to Best Buy for media. But it’s certainly fun to browse all the new tech and get a more hands-on view. I don’t blame them for this change, assuming the numbers make sense.
It's honestly the best place to buy electronics at this point if you don't have a Microcenter nearby. I buy all my laptops and TVs there now. Once upon a time, retail was the more expensive option, as they marked up prices and couldn't compete with the low overhead of online sellers. Now that equation has completely flipped, and anything sold online will rapidly inflate in price due to dropshippers and scalpers. The only way to get a fair deal anymore is brick and mortar, and they often have (real) discounts and 0% financing.
Best Buy has better TVs and Microcenter doesn't even touch home theater, home stereo, or photography. Microcenter is great for the DIY crowd and for getting cables. I prefer Best Buy for most anything else.
Best Buy is to blame for this because they started the race-to-the-bottom in DVD/CD sales back in the 90s. To undercut established chains they started selling movies and music at a loss. DVDs as low as $10, CDs for $5. It shifted the expected cost of media to the low end and publishers responded by printing discs the cheapest way possible. Poor compression, limited extra content, flimsy boxes and a single sheet insert. The typical DVD and later Blu-Ray bought in the US is junk.
It's part of why LPs have become fashionable again. The record itself is a work of art. You'll get it in a nice box or sleeve with multi-page booklet. When you hold a LP it has a substance that is lacking from a BD clamshell.
Not only that, Best Buy purchased Musicland / Sam Goody / Suncoast in 2001. They then unloaded it as a debt-ridden zombie just a few years later, after cannibalizing their supply/distribution network and customer base.
The Best Buy I most often frequent has already dropped their shelves for these. It's frustrating. Even Target seems to be slowly losing DVD/Blu-Ray shelves, they've definitely shrunk in a way like they are disappearing.
Recently, I have been leaning more on physical media as the price of streaming has gotten higher. I have a few comfort movies and shows, and I was able to trade HBO max for a few disks.
Like how records had a resurgence, I suspect that DVD/blu-ray will also have a resurgence. Especially if gamers still demand disk drives.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadAlthough it looked like they were toast at one point, they're at least somewhat profitable and have something like $40B in annual revenue--although that's declined somewhat year over year.
Not sure on the rest of the appliances. Is an odd listing.
Personally, I very rarely go into a Best Buy. Yes, I might buy a TV or a major appliance there but those are very rare purchases. I might browse once a year to see what the latest wearable and Internet of Crap stuff is out there but I literally can't remember the last time I bought something at a Best Buy.
That is a very specific tradeoff; I would personally avoid getting a phone through a carrier if I can help it.
I also tried to get a new surge protector in the same visit and they only had 2 choices in-store, both of them were over $50 for no obvious benefit over a $15 one from target.
I think they're planning to convert their stores into more of a "showroom" type experience that supports their online shopping. They converted at least half the floor-space of our local Best Buy into a warehouse/online order pickup area. IIRC, the guy manning one of the cell-phone displays was actually a Samsung employee.
Everything is online, so why not. Walmart has the luxury of being somewhat essential having grocery departments, so they can keep foot traffic that way - but a lot more people get groceries via delivery as well.
My family we're all pretty much -- if I see it, I want it, so I buy it regardless of if we should. Ordering delivery we buy a TON less junk food, and uneeded crap.
We just order what we need, it also helps with our ADHD because we forget ingredients ALL the time when planning meals, so we just call and have the meal tomorrow instead of today, but that ends up being 5 days later, and then something we did buy for that meal goes bad and its a vicious cycle.
The Walmart near me is always packed even though it's a lousy place IMO to try to do a full grocery shopping.
I don't know the numbers but my sense is that online grocery shopping didn't take off and stay taken off to nearly the degree that some people thought it would. I certainly don't see that many pickers in my local stores that offer delivery.
Because that was the point of Best Buy - if I was going to buy something online, I'd just get it from Amazon|eBay|Newegg. The point of Best Buy is that it's a physical store that you can go to in order to see the physical object before you buy it, buy it immediately (zero shipping time), and also as a secondary but important angle since it's an actual store you completely skip the "market" where people try to sell you counterfeit flash drives.
At least when they finally came to the Seattle area they picked one of the worst possible locations to open. Much like the ill-fated 'supermall' that opened in the valley south of Seattle (slightly closer to the secondary city of Tacoma) decades before it, they entered an area already well served by surrounding malls/businesses without enough value to the consumer to be worth the drive / trip to a new out of the way location. This was also during the era when it was still reasonable to order things from Amazon, without too much worry of co-mingling / risks; let alone newegg which had pulled back from a brick and mortar expansion to focus entirely online.
In the last few years of Fry's Electronics operating their Renton WA (South Seattle) location they were barely even better than E.G. BestBuy or Walmart for emergency part procurement. In fact both of those stores had methods of pricing online and IIRC also buying / checking inventory directly at the local store.
Offhand I suspect there was also some sort of toxic sales person focused competition among employees, since they always seemed to really want to have documentation on the sale of helping a customer reach their purchase.
Talking about it, Fry's Electronic's reminds me of what happened to Radio Shack. Really a failure to continue delivering value and adjust to the current market (which isn't to say eliminating the niche that makes them what they are within a market).
Are there full-quality digital/downloadable options that I'm not aware of?
Sometimes urgency is a factor.
I love going to Best Buy (and most stores), but maybe that’s just because it was great growing up with them as a source for all things electronic.
Personally I get more joy from browsing stores in person compared to browsing digitally. It becomes something to do—an event of sorts. We exist in the physical world; the digital world is less satisfying to my other senses.
Culture dies when libraries can't lend it (which they can today due to first sale doctrine applicable to physical media, whether books, DVDs, etc), and it's locked behind digital rights and streaming portals (where first sale doctrine does not apply). When physical media dies, you'll either be a consumer willing to pay "whatever the market will bear" for your temporary license (books, music, video, whatever), or a pirate. Archives can still accumulate culture for safekeeping (physically and digitally), it'll just be inaccessible to the public for a century or two sliding window into the past based on current flavor of copyright statute insanity.
https://time.com/6266147/internet-archive-copyright-infringe...
[0] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444
If you want DolbyVision, HDR, highest resolution and bitrate, physical media is still the only option that I’m aware of. Bummed about this happening because when I’ve tried ordering Bluray from Amazon, the discs sometimes show up loose in the cases and scratched up.
When I tried out the 4k Netflix option in early 2023 I found myself wanting an option to downgrade to their 1080p encoding for a few of the shows I was watching.
I was told Netflix hired really smart people for like 300-500k/year for the express purpose of avoiding stupid shit like this.
I realize different encoding can be more efficient but Netflix etc still just looks worse.
For something like a Marvel movie, whatever. For something like Planet Earth or 2001, watching it on streaming is disappointing after owning the disc version.
The bitrate of a 4k blu ray sometime peaks above 100MB/s, yet most streaming providers max out around 20MB/s.
There will always be a place for the enthusiast who is willing to put up with a little hassle and higher cost for a better overall experience, and boutique blu ray sales have really taken off lately for this exact reason.
This isn’t the death of physical media, but it might be the death of retail physical media.
FWIW If you find yourself without a choice other than streaming, check Apple first. They offer the highest bitrate typically.
It's kind of funny that on Bravia TVs, this means you have to connect wirelessly because their ethernet port only supports 100 Mbps.
DVD however is annoying. Waiting for the Menu, FBI warning - everything you don’t need nor want as paying customer.
So I am considering doing what needs to be done: NAT sever with ripped DVDs. Local streaming. ;)
A few times a year I’ll need a cable or an external hard drive, or a new controller, mouse etc, and want it right now and I’ll just walk to whichever Best Buy has it in stock. When I do I still have the same feelings I got as a kid when I’d go to circuit city and the impulse to browse is hard to resist.
They have a lot of fun gadgets, the connected home category keeps growing and growing… doorbells, smart speakers, VR, wearables, theraguns, peloton, e-bikes; not to mention gaming has never been bigger.
My anecdotal point is: there’s lots of techy things to sell besides commoditized content like CDs and Blu-ray’s. Personally I’m never going to Best Buy for media. But it’s certainly fun to browse all the new tech and get a more hands-on view. I don’t blame them for this change, assuming the numbers make sense.
PS: I miss Radio Shack badly :(
Rather get my electronics at Best Buy, Target, or Apple Store whether in store or online.
"you go tah BNH!"
It's part of why LPs have become fashionable again. The record itself is a work of art. You'll get it in a nice box or sleeve with multi-page booklet. When you hold a LP it has a substance that is lacking from a BD clamshell.
Recently, I have been leaning more on physical media as the price of streaming has gotten higher. I have a few comfort movies and shows, and I was able to trade HBO max for a few disks.
Like how records had a resurgence, I suspect that DVD/blu-ray will also have a resurgence. Especially if gamers still demand disk drives.